Sontag begins with the quintessential question asked of, and answered by, all prominent writers — to distill their most essential advice on the craft:

I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: “Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer’s virtue.

For instance: “Be serious.” By which I meant: Never be cynical. And which doesn’t preclude being funny.

With the disclaimer that “descriptions mean nothing without examples,” Sontag points to Gordimer as the “living writer who exemplifies all that a writer can be” and considers what the South African author’s “large, ravishingly eloquent, and extremely varied body of work” reveals about the key to all great writing:

A great writer of fiction both creates — through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms — a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.

She cautions that despite all the noble uses of literature, despite all the ways in which it can transcend the written word to achieve a larger spiritual purpose — William Faulkner’s conviction that the writer’s duty is “to help man endure by lifting his heart” comes to mind — storytelling is still literature’s greatest duty:

The primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) … Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature — the matchless storyteller.

To write is to know something. What a pleasure to read a writer who knows a great deal. (Not a common experience these days…) Literature, I would argue, is knowledge — albeit, even at its greatest, imperfect knowledge. Like all knowledge.

Still, even now, even now, literature remains one of our principal modes of understanding.

[…]

Everybody in our debauched culture invites us to simplify reality, to despise wisdom. There is a great deal of wisdom in Nadine Gordimer’s work. She has articulated an admirably complex view of the human heart and the contradictions inherent in living in literature and in history.

Nearly half a century after E.B. White proclaimed that the writer’s duty is “to lift people up, not lower them down,” Sontag considers “the idea of the responsibility of the writer to literature and to society” and clarifies the terms:

By literature, I mean literature in the normative sense, the sense in which literature incarnates and defends high standards. By society, I mean society in the normative sense, too — which suggests that a great writer of fiction, by writing truthfully about the society in which she or he lives, cannot help but evoke (if only by their absence) the better standards of justice and of truthfulness that we have the right (some would say the duty) to militate for in the necessarily imperfect societies in which we live.

Obviously, I think of the writer of novels and stories and plays as a moral agent… This doesn’t entail moralizing in any direct or crude sense. Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate — and, therefore, improve — our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

Illustration by Jim Stoten from ‘Mr. Tweed’s Good Deeds.’ Click image for details.

Every writer of fiction wants to tell many stories, but we know that we can’t tell all the stories — certainly not simultaneously. We know we must pick one story, well, one central story; we have to be selective. The art of the writer is to find as much as one can in that story, in that sequence … in that time (the timeline of the story), in that space (the concrete geography of the story).

[…]

A novelist, then, is someone who takes you on a journey. Through space. Through time. A novelist leads the reader over a gap, makes something go where it was not.

[…]

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once … and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

[…]

The work of the novelist is to enliven time, as it is to animate space.

Repeating her memorable assertion that criticism is “cultural cholesterol,” penned in her diary decades earlier, Sontag considers the reactive indignation that passes for criticism:

Most notions about literature are reactive — in the hands of lesser talents, merely reactive.

[…]

The greatest offense now, in matters both of the arts and of culture generally, not to mention political life, is to seem to be upholding some better, more exigent standard, which is attacked, both from the left and the right, as either naïve or (a new banner for the philistines) “elitist.”

Writing nearly a decade before the golden age of ebooks and some years before the epidemic of crowdsourced-everything had infected nearly every corner of creative culture, Sontag once again reveals her extraordinary prescience about the intersection of technology, society, and the arts. (Some decades earlier, she had presaged the “aesthetic consumerism” of visual culture on the social web.) Turning a critical eye to the internet and its promise — rather, its threat — of crowdsourced storytelling, she writes:

Hypertext — or should I say the ideology of hypertext? — is ultrademocratic and so entirely in harmony with the demagogic appeals to cultural democracy that accompany (and distract one’s attention from) the ever-tightening grip of plutocratic capitalism.

[But the] proposal that the novel of the future will have no story or, instead, a story of the reader’s (rather, readers’) devising is so plainly unappealing and, should it come to pass, would inevitably bring about not the much-heralded death of the author but the extinction of the reader — all future readers of what is labeled as “literature.”

Returning to the writer’s crucial task of selecting what story to tell from among all the stories that could be told, Sontag points to literature’s essential allure — the comfort of appeasing our anxiety about life’s infinite possibility, about all the roads not taken and all the immensities not imagined that could have led to a better destination than our present one. A story, instead, offers the comforting finitude of both time and possibility:

Every fictional plot contains hints and traces of the stories it has excluded or resisted in order to assume its present shape. Alternatives to the plot ought to be felt up to the last moment. These alternatives constitute the potential for disorder (and therefore of suspense) in the story’s unfolding.

[…]

Endings in a novel confer a kind of liberty that life stubbornly denies us: to come to a full stop that is not death and discover exactly where we are in relation to the events leading to a conclusion.

[…]

The pleasure of fiction is precisely that it moves to an ending. And an ending that satisfies is one that excludes. Whatever fails to connect with the story’s closing pattern of illumination the writer assumes can be safely left out of the account.

A novel is a world with borders. For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take within those borders. One could describe the story’s end as a point of magical convergence for the shifting preparatory views: a fixed position from which the reader sees how initially disparate things finally belong together.

There is an essential … distinction between stories, on the one hand, which have, as their goal, an end, completeness, closure, and, on the other hand, information, which is always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary.

For Sontag, these two modes of world-building are best exemplified by the dichotomy between literature and the commercial mass media. Writing in 2004, she saw television as the dominant form of the latter, but it’s striking to consider how true her observations hold today if we substitute “the internet” for every mention of “television.” One can only wonder what Sontag would make of our newsfeed-fetishism and our compulsive tendency to mistake the latest and most urgent for the most important. She writes:

Literature tells stories. Television gives information.

Literature involves. It is the re-creation of human solidarity. Television (with its illusion of immediacy) distances — immures us in our own indifference.

The so-called stories that we are told on television satisfy our appetite for anecdote and offer us mutually canceling models of understanding. (This is reinforced by the practice of punctuating television narratives with advertising.) They implicitly affirm the idea that all information is potentially relevant (or “interesting”), that all stories are endless — or if they do stop, it is not because they have come to an end but, rather, because they have been upstaged by a fresher or more lurid or eccentric story.

By presenting us with a limitless number of nonstopped stories, the narratives that the media relate — the consumption of which has so dramatically cut into the time the educated public once devoted to reading — offer a lesson in amorality and detachment that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel.

Indeed, this notion of moral obligation is what Sontag sees as the crucial differentiator between storytelling and information — something I too have tussled with, a decade later, in contemplating the challenge of cultivating wisdom in the age of information, particularly in a media landscape driven by commercial interest whose very business model is predicated on conditioning us to confuse information with meaning. (Why think about what constitutes a great work of art — how it moves you, what it says to your soul — when you can skim the twenty most expensive paintings in history on a site like Buzzfeed?)

In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always … an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution — which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our media-disseminated glut of unending stories.

Television gives us, in an extremely debased and untruthful form, a truth that the novelist is obliged to suppress in the interest of the ethical model of understanding peculiar to the enterprise of fiction: namely, that the characteristic feature of our universe is that many things are happening at the same time. (“Time exists in order that it doesn’t happen all at once… space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”)

And therein lies Sontag’s greatest, most timeless, most urgently timely point — for writers, and for human beings:

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention — a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.

But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding — which is also the understanding of the novelist — to take this in.

How does a mind being differ from a soul being? Both are *ISSA type beings. Both can exist side by side on the same world, in the same dimension, be of the same species. Both can think, reason, analyze, learn. Both experience feelings and emotions, engage in what appears to be similar relationships with others. Both can perform similar tasks, are interchangeable in what they can do. Where’s the all-important difference?

There exists a fundamental difference. The mindbeing operates on a vibrational or power level not accessible to the soulbeing. An evolved mindbeing is totally self empowered while a soulbeing can only function in a controlled and controlling environment; as a sycophant, follower, believer, basically as a slave of something it acknowledges and needs to be above itself. The mind being is perfectly comfortable living in as an individual, without companionship, i.e., friends, lovers, family, groupies, “fellow” members of any number of collectives; without belonging to, or being an associate of. Conversely the soul being cannot exist without these appurtenances and societal paraphernalia.

Going deeper into this, the mind being is a free agent. It doesn’t need to cling to any teaching or doctrine; rule or law. It “believes all things, believes in nothing.” Again, and conversely, the life of the soul being is totally circumscribed by what it has been taught. It operates on the basis of doctrines. It cannot function without some superior entity making rules and laws for it to follow and obey.

Perhaps the greatest difference between these two entities is that the mind being, while going along with rules and laws imposed by the rulers of society will do so strictly to fulfill its obligations to that society or to satisfy the physical laws that bind that society together and allow it to function. Conversely the soul being will obey the rules and laws only if they benefit it as an individual or if it is afraid of getting caught and punished if it does not obey. Freedom drives the mind being; force and fear drive the soul being.

Let’s use a simple example: the mind being will drive to but seldom exceed the speed limit, not because it couldn’t easily go much faster but because of foremost importance it sets itself up as an example to others. It also knows the limitations and pitfalls of vehicular states of repair, road conditions, and the vagaries of driver skills in traffic. The mind being is constantly aware that life in material conditions is a crap shoot but more importantly, being at least partially empathetic it would never be the source of harm or danger for others, nor would it want to be saddled with grief or guilt, two debilitating conditions it could not avoid should it ever be the cause of harm, hurt, pain or loss to another. Conversely the soul being has no such restraints. If it causes pain or harm to another it will take a number of possible paths to avoid punishment or prosecution. It carries insurance and relies on it. If it is found at fault it will try to deny responsibility by lying and casting blame. It will play the sympathy card and if that doesn’t work it will seek legal help to “get off.”

The mind being lives in a state of detachment, something the soul being simply cannot comprehend. The mind being does not entertain special, emotional relationships such as a lover or special partner or special children who must take precedence over the needs of someone else not special. The mind being chooses not to make that distinction. This is incomprehensible to the soul being whose entire life is bound up in creating, maintaining, belonging to or denigrating, despising, abusing and breaking up special relationships of lovers, husband or wife, parents, children, extended family, special groups, fellowships, tribe, race, country, gender.

Basically it comes down to personal empowerment and integrity. The mind being lives for, and by, integrity. It has that personal power allowing it to look at any situation and by applying compassion to it, knowing exactly what is the right thing to do. Having that built-in integrity, it has no problem following through and doing the right thing. Further, the mind being is not body centered and exists in a state of willing and chosen servanthood and self-sacrifice. Conversely such a state of beingness is considered weak or stupid by the average soul being whose modus operandi is primarily predatory self-protection, self-aggrandizement and personal profit at someone or something else’s expense.

Some important questions: based on the above, which category best exemplifies an evolved human being? Which do you think your parents, teachers, political and/or religious leaders and superiors, belong to? Which category of human being would you choose to belong to?

There are various states of consciousness, however meditation is one of the most important of them. It increases cardiovascular quality, lowers blood pressure, decreases anxiety and among quantum physicists is considered the fourth state of consciousness in which the entire brain is engaged. But it also does something very important — it increases wisdom.

A new study, “The Relationship between Mental and Somatic Practices and Wisdom,” published in PLOS ONE, confirms the age-old conception that meditation is associated with wisdom. Surprisingly, it also concludes that somatic (physical) practices such as classical ballet might lead to increased wisdom.

Meditation prevents stresses from getting into the bodily system and already pent up stresses are let out. Both happen simultaneously and we tap the source and joy of what we are. As this state consumes us more and more, we become happier, anything we see, we feel, we look at, becomes more intense and more beautiful. Each of our senses then does the job of all the other senses too. Our knowledge increase and becomes more intuitive. Our consciousness makes us feel that our body is part of the whole, part of the entire creation and the entire creation is part of us.

“As far as I know this is the first study to be published that looks at the relationship between meditation or ballet and increased wisdom,” said Monika Ardelt, associate professor of sociology at the University of Florida. Ardelt is a leading wisdom researcher who was not involved in the project. “That meditation is associated with wisdom is good to confirm, but the finding that the practice of ballet is associated with increased wisdom is fascinating. I’m not going to rush out and sign up for ballet, but I think this study will lead to more research on this question.”

The researchers included ballet in the study, “not expecting to find that it was associated with wisdom, but rather for comparison purposes,” said Patrick B. Williams, lead author and a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Chicago’s Department of Psychology. Williams is a member of a research project on somatic wisdom headed by principal investigators Berthold Hoeckner, associate professor of music; and Howard Nusbaum, professor of psychology.

“The link between ballet and wisdom is mysterious to us and something that we’re already investigating further,” Williams said. This includes ongoing studies with adult practitioners of ballet, as well as among novices training at Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet. Williams wants to track novices and seasoned practitioners of both meditation and ballet for months and years to see whether the association holds up over time.

The published research was groundbreaking because science has overlooked somatic practices as a possible path to wisdom, Williams said.

The qualities the world desperately needs more of, namely love, kindness and compassion, are indeed teachable. Scientists have mostly focused on the benefits of meditation for the brain and the body, and a recent study by Northeastern University’s David DeSteno, published in Psychological Science, took a look at what impacts meditation has on interpersonal harmony and compassion.

Unstudied topic

“No studies have examined whether physical practices are linked to the cultivation of personal wisdom, nor have they theorized that this association might exist,” the study stated.

Understanding the kinds of experiences that are related to increases in wisdom is fundamental in two aspects of the UChicago research, Nusbaum said.

“As we learn more about the kinds of experiences that are related to wisdom, we can gain insight into ways of studying the mechanisms that mediate wisdom. This also lets us shift from thinking about wisdom as something like a talent to thinking about it as something more like a skill,” he said. “And if we think about wisdom as a skill, it is something we can always get better at, if we know how to practice.”

The researchers administered a self-reported survey to 298 participants using Survey Monkey, a popular Internet-based tool that is being used increasingly in scientific research. The survey asked about experience (both in number of years and hours of practice) as a teacher or student of four activities: meditation, the Alexander Technique (a method for improving posture, balance, coordination, and movement), the Feldenkrais Method (a form of somatic education that seeks to improve movement and physical function, reduce pain, and increase self-awareness), and classical ballet. It also included psychological questionnaires that asked about characteristics thought to be components of wisdom, such as empathy and anxiety.

The results showed that those who practice meditation–vipassana (29 percent), mindfulness (23 percent), Buddhist (14 percent), and other types–had more wisdom, on average, than those in the three other groups. More importantly, it established for the first time that the link between meditation and wisdom might be attributable to a lower level of anxiety.

“We are the first to show an association between wisdom, on the one hand, and mental and somatic practice, on the other,” Williams said. “We’re also the first to suggest that meditation’s ability to reduce everyday anxiety might partially explain this relationship.”

Participants who practiced ballet had the lowest levels of wisdom. Nevertheless, the more they practiced ballet, the higher they scored on measures of psychological traits that are associated with wisdom.

Causal relationship?

Williams said it’s important to note that the research was not looking for and did not establish a causal relationship between wisdom and any of the four practices. But the results suggest that further study could identify such a causal relationship.

“We hope our exploratory research will encourage others to replicate our results and look for other experiences that are linked with wisdom, as well as the factors that might explain such links,” Williams said.

“Although wisdom, as an intellectual pursuit, is one of the oldest subjects studied by human-kind, it is one of the youngest, as a scientific pursuit,” he added.

Ardelt thinks this study will generate a lot of interest with the public and in the growing field of the study of wisdom, especially due to the current interest in meditation. “These findings indicate that meditation might have more benefits than as a stress-reduction or pain-reduction technique,” she said.

If mental and somatic practices can lead to more wisdom, “their applications should be explored across settings such as in the classroom or workplace with the goal of creating not only wiser people but also a wiser society,” the researchers concluded.